Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Epic poems are lengthy narrative verse compositions, typically consisting of many hundreds of lines. These can be oral or written and have traditionally been considered among the most prestigious and masterful forms of literature in the Western tradition. The most famous examples of epic poetry in Western culture are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, likely composed during the archaic period of Classical Antiquity around the 8th century BCE. More recent examples include Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Divine Comedy, John Milton’s (1608-1674) Paradise Lost, and John Keats’s (1795-1821) Endymion.

A grapholect is a particular dialect (distinct sub-variety) of a language that has developed specifically through the medium of text. Grapholects are often more syntactically elaborate than spoken dialects, with far greater magnavocabularies than can be sustained by any purely oral language. Dominant grapholects have high prestige and are often promoted as the ‘correct’ form of the language in prescriptivist pedagogical instruction.

Orality refers to thought and expression in primary oral cultures—those cultures unfamiliar with writing and unaffected by its impacts. Ong was a pioneer in the study of orality, and his work such as Orality and Literacy proved foundational to the subject. Ong prefers the term ‘orality’ to the broadly equivalent term ‘illiteracy’ because the former term does not derive through contrast with the unnatural state of ‘literacy.